I just wanted to share one of my latest :)

The age of superabundance

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The competitive forces of the agora have transformed the whole of humanity into one giant problem-solving machine, a global supercomputer of unlimited potential. Paradoxically, the growing population and wealth of this new world is on a path to consuming fewer and fewer of the Earth’s finite resources. Progress, it seems, is beginning to evaporate the material world itself.

Malthusian Fallacies

I have talked a bit about Malthusianism in the context of food production. But the basic idea, that we humans could exhaust the Earth’s finite resources is pervasive. There is a long history of well-educated thinkers prophesying resource depletion, claiming that we will imminently run out of food, oil, helium, water…you name it. Malthusians always arrive at the same conclusion; the only way to save ourselves is to reduce our numbers or “degrow.” But as we have seen, the nature of progress is paradoxical. Malthusians forget that while matter and energy are finite in this universe, knowledge is not. Progress has thus far enabled us to overcome the constraints of the material world.

One of the biggest proponents of Malthusianism in the 20th Century was biologist Paul Ehrlich. He famously proclaimed that humanity would face mass famine in the 1970s as the global population outstripped the supply of food. He similarly forecast dire predictions of shortages of essential commodities. His thinking was, and remains, common among biologists who view humans as just another mammal that is beholden to laws of nature. In biology, it is understood that an environment has a maximum “carrying capacity” for a particular species, beyond which their population must fall to maintain the proper ecological balance.

Economists, on the other hand, were less concerned. They understood that pricing signals would drive the “problem solving machine” to innovate and resolve shortages of resources before they became acute. Humans are certainly mammals but our ability to transmit information through communication and cultural evo...

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